The other day a friend and I took our young sons on a tour of the Met Office’s centre near Exeter. The Met Office is home to the Hadley Centre, one of the foremost centres where climate modelling and research into climate change takes place. It was to turn out to be an event I left both angry and puzzled, and with some reflections I’d like to share here. The tour itself is of little consequence to this piece, other than to say that it managed to turn what could have been really interesting hour’s tour into a fairly tedious 3 hours, and certainly not a tour designed to sustain children’s interest. The low point for me, however, was when we actually reached the Hadley Centre. So, picture the scene …
With some considerable amount of fanfare and dancing elephants, I would like to introduce you today to the all-new Transition Research Primer. It is the creation of the Transition Research Network (TRN), a self-organising peer group of academics and community activists which aims to:
Help advance understanding and practice in Transition
Support Transition groups to address their research needs
Help transform the crisis in our universities into an opportunity for positive change in research culture, making research relevant, fulfilling, and fun.
Well this is all very exciting isn’t it. It’s the first Transition Culture/Resilience.org webinar, today, at 5pm BST. So here’s how it’s going to work. You need to watch this box below which will spring into life just before 5pm.
* The video recording of this will be posted soon *
Joanna and Chris will speak for about 15 minutes, I’ll ask them a couple of questions, and then I’ll ask them your questions, which you will be able to send in during the webinar. The whole thing will be recorded and uploaded onto YouTube at some point in the future. That’s about it really. See you back here at 5pm. If you bring popcorn or crisps do eat them quietly.
Usually when I go to events I tend to be the ‘resilience guy’, or one of a handful of people who work with and think about resilience who tend to gather at the back of other events and bemoan the fact that no-one has talked about resilience yet. So I was fascinated when I saw that the British Red Cross was hosting a one-day conference on resilience, the first that I’ve been aware of. They had stated that the objectives of the day were to:
share and generate learning on how resilience building works in practice in various settings and from a variety of perspectives – in other words, what works well and why?
understand how humanitarian agencies can effectively contribute to building resilience within communities.
About 200 people attended, including researchers and policy-makers, community activists, people involved in refugee services,emergency/humanitarian response,health and social care and age-related resilience. It was a fascinating day, and one that I’d like to share five of my lightbulb moments from the day.
How does this resonate with your experience of being involved in Transition? Your group is highly effective, generally harmonious, communicates clearly and effectively, has power dynamics which are understood and enjoyed by everyone, deals creatively with conflict and runs its meetings in such a way that people look forward to them and love being part of them. If your answer sits anywhere between “absolutely not” and “hmmm”, then you might enjoy this short video:
It’s an introduction to Transition Training’s new ‘Effective Groups’ training and resources, developed by trainer Nick Osborne, who also narrates it. I spoke to Nick, and what follows is a choice of audio from our conversation broken into different questions, or some notes for those who would rather read the key points.
How might our response to peak oil and climate change look more like a party than a protest march? This site explores the emerging transition model in its many manifestations
Read more»
Subscribe
Keep up to date with my posts by subscribing to email updates:
